All this aggravated Frederick’s already poor relations with the American officials. He could do little except insist on his version of events. Shortly thereafter, he wrote, in his careful longhand, a detailed response to Ravndal, in which he politely and firmly explained “once more”: “I have no wife in Germany, because I have my wife with me here.” He continued, “As I wrote to you before, I divorced my former wife in Moscow, because she committed a break of marriage in having a Bolshevik Commissar for her lover for about 2 years.” Frederick then explained:
I divorced this Woman and married my present wife under the Bolshevik Laws, because there were no other Laws, as we were living in the Bolshevik time. Now Sir, I will admit, no Man is supposed to support ones former wife one divorced under such circumstances. What concerns me Sir, I know she is not ill because I have some very near relatives of mine living in Berlin, who inform me exactly about the Life my Child is leading there. As I told you before Sir, my former wife is not the mother of my Daughter Irma, as I had no children at all with her and she only keeps my daughter with her because she thinks I’ll support her for the Girls’ sake, as I would’nt let my Child starve. Certainly if I had a passport, I would go to Berlin and take my Girl away with me, but now as it is, I can’t move from here; what concerns my Documents, which could prove, that divorcing my former wife and marrying my present wife are facts Sir, I’ve told you before, that I’ve been robbed of them in Russia, so that I came here to Constantinople without any papers. Now Sir, begging to excuse me for disturbing you once more with this painful story of mine and hoping, I have well explained everything concerning my connection to this Woman, I remain very respectfully
Frederick added the phrase about his birthplace as an afterthought (he used a different pen) to remind the diplomats of his claim to an American passport. However, none of this made any difference; the diplomats did not believe him. The next time one of them wrote to the State Department, he characterized Elvira as Frederick’s “free-love companion.”
Valli’s resurfacing in Berlin with Irma was not the only dramatic twist in Frederick’s family life at this time. Olga, his oldest daughter, suddenly turned up in Romania, alive, apparently well, and married, with the surname “Golitzine.” On June 13, 1921, she had a telegram sent in French from Bucharest to the American consul general in Constantinople requesting that Frederick be informed of her whereabouts and that she “manque totalement”—“has nothing.” Getting the news must have been a joy and a relief for Frederick because he had heard nothing about her for over two years, ever since she disappeared during the evacuation of Odessa. He had been very close to her and on the eve of the revolution was grooming her to help him in his business. Frederick may well have recognized her new surname because the Golitsyns (there are different transliterations) were one of the most famous and grandest of princely families in imperial Russia; it is likely, however, that Olga’s husband simply had the same name as this family. Frederick did respond to her plea for help. By 1923 he was sending her 1,500 francs a month, which would be equivalent to several thousand dollars today (things had improved for him by then), and he continued to do this for three years, even after she moved to Paris to study.
Despite his chronic money shortages, Frederick husbanded what he had and insisted on trying to give his family in Constantinople the best life that he could. He bought Elvira new outfits from a local couturiere in Chichli, although he did pass on getting her a fur muff that cost the equivalent of $500. As he told a friendly American tourist, he was having his sons educated “at some of the best schools in the Near East,” which in Constantinople meant those that were private and foreign. In the summer of 1921, Bruce was six, Fedya seven, and Mikhail fifteen. Given their father’s efforts to reestablish himself as an American, and his claim that he intended to return to the United States and place his sons in school, all three must have attended one of the English-language schools in or near the city; there were several to choose from. However, of the three sons, only Mikhail was destined to complete his education and to do so in Prague, which was to become a haven for young Russians in the diaspora in the 1920s.
At the end of August and the beginning of September 1921, the history of Turkey unexpectedly changed and Frederick’s fate changed with it. Some two hundred miles to the southeast of Constantinople, on the arid Anatolian highland near the Sakarya River—a place that seemed very far from the marble halls of power on the banks of the Bosporus—the Turkish Nationalist army that had formed under Mustafa Kemal’s leadership won a series of bloody battles against the Greek army that had invaded Turkey with Allied help two years earlier. The Turkish victory stopped a Greek march on Angora—“Ankara,” as it is now known—the Nationalists’ new capital, and was a turning point in what the Turks came to celebrate as their war for independence against the Allied occupiers. As a result, Italy and France dropped their plans to partition Anatolia and withdrew from the region. A year later, Kemal would force the Allies to abandon the Treaty of Sèvres, including their scheme to transform Constantinople into an international city, a decision that would affect Frederick directly. For his victory at Sakarya, Kemal, who had already been elected president by the Turkish Grand National Assembly in April 1920, was promoted to the rank of field marshal and given the title “Gazi,” “warrior against the infidels”—an honorific that dated back to the Ottomans.
These distant rumblings of war and changes on the geopolitical map of Turkey reminded Frederick once again that it was time to seek the shelter of an American passport. Moreover, in recent months his financial situation had finally started to improve. His income increased and he had managed to pay off most of his earlier debts. He had also begun to act more assertively toward his remaining creditors as well as the American diplomats, succeeding even in mollifying Ravndal at times.
When Frederick went to the consulate general on September 15 to fill out a new passport application he was better prepared. The official who took his information, Alfred Burri, a New Yorker by birth, was also far more conscientious than Allen had been two years earlier. Nevertheless, Frederick still stumbled badly when he came to the all-important “Affidavit to Explain Protracted Foreign Residence and to Overcome Presumption of Expatriation.” In a spirit of candor that was as misguided as it was surprising, he admitted: “At the present moment I have a growing theatrical business at Constantinople and wish to be near Russia where I wish to go to look after my property in Moscow at the first opportunity.” And as if this were not bad enough, he confessed that though he planned to make a “business trip” to the United States with his “oldest boy” soon, “I have so large a business in Europe & Russia that I must stay near these for some time to come & will keep my family with me.” When Frederick left the consulate general, he may have been satisfied that he had completed an important chore, but he did not realize that he had also made a gift to those in Constantinople and Washington who were eager to deny him the protection he sought.
Burri’s assessment of Frederick’s case, which he had to forward to the State Department, shows that his feelings were mixed. He acknowledges that Frederick is a very clever businessman and “owns and operates by far the highest class cabaret” in Constantinople. He also sympathizes with Frederick and implicitly distances himself from the prevailing American racial bias.